Women in Entertainment Power 100

Never Miss A Story.

Daily Edition

My Morning Jacket Frontman Jim James Announces Solo Album

ATO Records will be releasing the 'Regions of Light and Sound of God' on Feb. 5, 2013.

Jim James newly announced solo album is supposed to sort of sound like a robot's "hazy dream" -- but the first track has still got the singer's trademark My Morning Jacket croon.

The alt-rock frontman debuted a new song, "Know Til Now," alongside the news, via Pitchfork, that he'll be releasing nine songs from a solo project next spring.

"I wanted the album to sound like it came from a different place in time," said James in a press release describing the project. "Perhaps sounding as if it were the past of the future, if that makes any sense—like a hazy dream that a fully-realized android or humanoid capable of thought might have when it reminisces about the good old days of just being a simple robot."

The album, as the release states, will contain songs with titles like "State of the Art (A.E.I.O.U.)" that were inspired in part by a 1929 graphic novel called God's Man. The album's ambitious-sounding title is Regions of Light and Sound of God, and it is scheduled to arrive on February 5, 2013.

"I wanted to make a record where I played all the instruments and produced/engineered it myself," James said in the press release. Judging by "Know Til Now," the sound of James solo project initially reminds of Shins frontman James Mercer's Broken Bells offerings as much as the spacey jam band style of My Morning Jacket.

"It's got some mellow stuff on there, but it's also got some really different stuff. I'm really proud of it. I think it's got some different soundscapes that I've been into that maybe have been hidden on some Jacket records," James had said to Rolling Stone of the forthcoming album's tone.

Even though James hasn't recorded a solo album, he has previously branched away from the band he leads. In 2009, he collaborated on a well-received album with M. Ward and Conor Oberst under the name Monsters of Folk. The last studio album for My Morning Jacket, Circuital, debuted at #5 on the Billboard 200 chart with 55,000 copies sold in its debut week in June 2011.